What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

24. The Philosophy of the Panopticum* (1923)

Currently, in Lindenpassage, there is a historic auction of the last of the Berlin panopticums. A whole world of wax, curiosity, expert copies of life, plastic horror, is being broken up. It was a police report in wax, a three-dimensional chronique scandaleuse—and at the same time it immortalized those high points of world history that seemed made for the panoptical form: parades, coronations, five-star pageants. Thanks to a cannily symbolic layout, the Chamber of Horrors was just one step away from the Fairy-tale Hall, and the Rulers of Europe a curtain’s thickness from the Fun House. It was the revelation of the paradoxical philosophy of the panopticum that earthly grandeur and horror became ridiculous by being given permanence in wax. Never has a memorial industry so stripped its objects of all dignity as the panoptical one. It made monuments without the pathos of piety. A wax Goethe quite naturally lacks the gravitas of a marble one. The cheap material was able to achieve a lifelike color but not the afflatus of genius. The only achievement of the panopticum was the unintentional ridiculousness with which it atoned for the pathos of this world, and turned it into a kind of Fun House Gallery.

This is because the chief characteristic of the panopticum, its frightening verisimilitude, is finally ridiculous. It is the — actually profoundly unartistic — impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photography and the “copy.” A wax mass murderer is comical. But a wax Rothschild is also ridiculous. The medium has robbed the one of his gruesomeness and the other of his dignity.

The panopticum has fallen victim to the times, to our awakened pleasure in movement, which expresses itself in the popularity of film. In the age of the movies, the panopticum has no part to play. In an age of intense bustle, rigidity is impossible, even if it attempts to mask its deadness in pedantic lifelikeness. A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

For the very last time the models have a kind of urgency and newsworthiness. The auction is being held — oh, the irony! — in the rooms of the White Mouse. The wax heads are piled up in the anteroom. For practical reasons they have been detached from their bodies, but not completely from the vestiges of their former lives. Here a bearded head has managed to hang on to its cravat, there a shirtfront remains draped around a severed neck. A naked wax girl still smiles, even after her body shattered into pathetic pieces as it was being moved, and the contrast between the smiling lips and the broken body is so gruesomely ironic that for the very first time, a suggestion of grotesque animation emanates from the figure. It looks as though a mass grave of preserved heads had been discovered, a grisly charnel house of dead life. All these beings lost their heads in the flower of their youth, it looks as though their souls had been vouchsafed some joyful experience, and the painful end that overtook them seconds later had no time to change their expressions. Beside the two hundred heads living men bargain and haggle, and enormous moving men drink soup with slurps of satisfaction.

In the room next door are stuffed apes and skeletons of apes, the dusty booty of popular science that shows only the results and says nothing about connections and details. Minerals and rare plants and anthropological bric-a-brac, Indian quivers and spears and arrows: everything an example of semicivilization and indiscriminate dabbling, the world of insatiably curious encyclopedia subscribers, always eager, always wrong. The items provoke a kind of sentimental contemplation, and they too, like the wax figures, are victims of these times, which create one-sided specialists in the hope of making people of deep learning, as opposed to people of broad and general culture.

In the auction room they sell elephant tusks; two men almost come to blows over a piece of wood carving and a copper vat of supernatural dimensions, a container from the time of icthyosaurs. It is astonishing that a man can spend a hundred million and more on a single day on a lot of tin, wood, bronze, broken tables, thrones, and glass cabinets. Watching him, I suddenly understand the point of this auction: The man is not buying out of sentiment. He is, rather, an exemplar of the new times, in a short fur coat, cigar jammed between metal teeth, all calm and calculating: a schemer, a man working his percentages, confident of victory. God knows what his hands will make of those pots and plates and carvings, how the horrid monsters will change in his storehouses. Twentieth-century man can turn ducats out of all sorts of trash.

Which is really the higher purpose of the panopticum.

The gold maker of our time, the modern alchemist, makes capital out of the sensation of the past. He finds the stone of wisdom — not by experimenting but by speculation — in every medieval cooking pot. Whatever he touches appreciates.

So there he stands, victor over the ephemeral world, gold maker, highest bidder, all-purchaser. His spacious girth has room for an entire panopticum, pots and pans, spears and apes, murderers and princes, the grotesque and the trivial. He swallows it all up — the ultimate redeemer of panoptical existence.

Berliner Börsen Courier, February 25, 1923

25. An Hour at the Amusement Park (1924)

Spring in Berlin received its official sanction as a season of merriment (Amüsemang),* with the opening of the enormous Luna Park, just beyond the Halensee Bridge, set by the God of sensations at the very end of the Kurfürstendamm, which seems like one never-ending promise of sensations. Here the fun becomes insane, the absurdity hyperbolic, the jollification both strenuous and harmless. There are infernal machines that cause bitter sweat before they rouse any joys: a deranged pyramid that tries to top its own summit. Undemanding fun becomes its own caricature. How strange that someone trying to have a good time will walk up an uncertain jazz band staircase, get stuck halfway up, unable to go up or down, and instead of laughing, finds himself laughed at by everyone else!

The whole purpose of this grotesque machine is to expose the person who entrusted himself to its mercy in his full inadequacy. The point of the other amusements is the same. Woe betide him who breaches the circumference of the “Devil’s Wheel”! The good fellow will walk out onto a round arena, and look back over his shoulder with a smile. Suddenly the signal will sound, what was solid becomes flimsy, what was secure uneasy, the floor spins, bodies collide with one another, outstretched arms vainly seek for somewhere to grip in this suddenly deranged world of violent spinning. You may reach for the barriers, but they too are spinning, the coattails of the man next to you are flying out, the cane propped on the quaking ground is shaken free of one’s trembling grasp, a savage draft seizes you by the neck and hurls you centuries back. You will land somewhere in the Stone Age! Never yet has such furious movement brought in its train such slowness in the passage of time. Everything is spinning, only time stands still. The rotation goes on forever. And when the wheel finally stops spinning, the riders in their relief forget that they have paid money to enjoy themselves, and only had the fright of their lives. They feel glad to have gotten out alive.

Roller coaster in Luna Park, 1928.

See the Tin Lake! Its metal waves coil endlessly, the pushing and lifting force of hidden engines creates swells and calms, heights and troughs. You sit in your boat and think the gentle rhythm of the water will rock you a little. Then a wave rears up and makes straight for you. You struggle against it, without leaving the spot, till an expert knocks your boat forward with a contemptuous shove. The energy you expended would have sufficed to see you through a real storm at sea.

Someone tries to cover a round target with six flat rubber disks. He throws one after another, hoping to win himself a wristwatch. The desire to win impels his arm, the fear of losing holds it back, and his excited consciousness, the seat of prudence and of frivolity, wavers between the will to throw and the trembling arm. Meanwhile any jewelery store would offer him the same “guaranteed 100 percent Swiss watch” for the same money and with no exertion or risk.

The enjoyment here is in the mockery of human endeavor. I watch a gentleman shattering the crockery in the “China store” by flinging hard rubber balls at it. He isn’t aware that the sounds of breakage are what prompt him to new efforts, he throws one ball after another, he hasn’t noticed that a number of people are clustering around, watching him. Maybe they have some terrible glimmering of the truth, and the question whether this devastation might be the meaning of life, is stillborn on their lips. .

Frankfurter Zeitung, May 16, 1924

26. The Twelfth Berlin Six-Day Races (1925)

As I write, the eager cyclists have already covered more than eight hundred miles, without having gone anywhere. They don’t even want to get anywhere! They go around and around the same track, which is two hundred meters long and a million meters boring. If this track had a finish line, then you could say there was a prize waiting for them at the end, for which it was worth putting themselves through six days of torment. The track has no finish line, but still there is a prize for the riders: That’s the type of silly, childish thoughts I have as I watch the race. There are only another hundred hours to go. If I stayed here, my face would get to look like the loudhailer by which the crowd in this madhouse is from time to time fed bits of information. Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like loudhailers, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies, like bicycles, like blind wants, like decadent barbarism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God’s image seems to be so strong in humans that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it. They still look human, even at the end of six days of racing, or of watching the races. On the sixth day God created man, so that man might race for six days. It was worth it.

It’s a Saturday night. Packed buses race through the streets headed for the Kaiserdamm. There are a hundred policemen. At the turnstiles the people press — there really isn’t a comparison, I should have to say — like people trying to get into the six-day races. At eight o’clock the loudhailer announced that there were no more tickets. There are resigned people, turning back, quiet, sad, their heads hanging. They are inconsolable. That’s the way souls look as the gates of heaven are banged shut in front in their metaphorical faces. Whole families head for home. Men with crying infants in their arms. Men who seem close to tears themselves. Oh! Where can they go now? Six days they have worked, and every evening, before going to sleep, they have sworn to others and to themselves that on the Saturday they would definitely go to the six-day races. What’s left for them? Suicide, at best! But even experienced suicides will insist that their own death is much less exciting than one of Huschke’s “breaks.”

Enough of those unhappy ones! Let’s turn our attention instead to those prudent souls who four days ago locked up their homes and set off with backpacks, subtenants, grandchildren, dogs, parrots, and canaries to the Kaiserdamm, to set up house there. They have brought with them everything the police have said it is illegal to bring. Their pets are in the rucksacks, occasionally betraying their presence with pathetic cries for help, directed at a public that is not inclined to betray its humanity by any sort of sympathy. The moment a tormented dog yelps here, he sounds like one of the humans anyway. All the way around the steep walls, faces, faces, faces. The rows are like shelves, head is pressed alongside head, like the spines of books in a great library. Sometimes you get a notion you might take down one or another of them from its place, between finger and thumb. But you’d be wrong. The heads are mounted on bodies, and the bodies are glued — glued by excitement and sweat — to their seats. Ten thousand throats emit a wild cry, a single cry, that drowns out the more evolved yelp of any barking dog. Down there a rider has “broken.” What a sensation!

Painful, the deathly white of the floodlights, great lamps as hard and heartless as suns in the underworld, glacial suns, spreading an atmosphere of polar festiveness. The shine of the lights drives you toward the cloakroom. Just where the cone of light cuts into the shadow with a razor-sharp edge, millions of particles of dust are busy. When the crowd cries out, there is a commotion among them: tumult, terror, chaos among the placid Brownian floating and drifting of the dust particles. So violent is the effect on the atmosphere. Sometimes the dust storm of ecstasy is enough to throw the packed human ranks into disorder as well. Shrill women’s cries (giving the lie to the expression “weaker sex”) whirl furiously into the massed basses of men’s voices, and it is like being given a firsthand experience of the Furies. At the same time a conscientious housewife unpacks some long-stored piece of cheese from the editorial page of her newspaper, and there is a whiff of food and politics. The smell sinks, beaten down by the gravid air, hangs above the heads of those sitting below like a louring cloud, and they look up, suspiciously, furiously, as though they could see the smell and kill it with their eyes. Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down.

Policemen hold on to pillars, occasionally even, when there is no honest citizen around, on to the backs of pickpockets, for a sight of the track. So far is the majesty of the state lowered by the enthusiasm of the population. It’s impossible to spot the plainclothesmen, not even with their regulation rubber collars on. They could really achieve something here — if only they were still up to it! If a burglar managed to get to the racetrack, it would be like a sanctuary for him. Thirsty people pull bottles of schnapps out of their pockets and offer their neighbors a drink. People behave humanely, as during a shared calamity. Someone who has left his seat to answer a call that is even more irresistible than the lure of the six-day races returns to find his place taken. Then human kindness turns into its opposite, and there is a bout of fisticuffs between the two pretenders. The great excitement holds thousands of little excitements.

Down below, on the mirror-smooth track, the riders go around, backs parallel to the ground, around and around and around. Hour after hour, mile after mile. Push pedals, right and left, break, get left behind, ahead of you another man, steel and rubber, a shirt, dripping sweat, all round you the crowd, at the end of six days a prize, a bath, a long rest, a photographer, flashbulbs, a woman, champagne, a trip somewhere, a write-up in a sports paper. At the end of six days is life, which exists for you because you’ve just raced for six days, and so that you can race another six days. You’re not yet dead, but you’re still waiting to enter life. Listen to the trumpet, the six days of judgment are at hand, the loudhailer announcing a prize for winning a section of the race, awarded by a patron who’s feeling bored, and doesn’t want to have come here for nothing. He has things to do later, his chauffeur is freezing outside, clapping his hands to stay warm. So: Let’s put up a small prize to give the lazy fellows a kick up the behind, get them to show a bit of life! They show a bit of life.

It’s past midnight; a sleepy little girl, some sports fan’s offspring, is crying in a whiny little voice, her wailing has trouble clearing a little path for itself through the dirty airwaves:* A minor acoustic tragedy is at hand. A drunkard is reeling around in the background, and his tongue struggles with the language, obstinately and bitterly, for a whole hour. People tell him to pipe down. He can’t. Whatever is bothering him has to be told. A few are asleep and snoring. Their noses rattle loudly and rhythmically, like little carts laden with old iron, on narrow tracks. In balconies and boxes bald heads gleam like round mirrors. What, precisely, is the relationship between capital and hair loss?

Dawn is about to break. No inkling of the new day will be seen in here. Here the icy suns of the underworld will continue to shine, the wheels will turn, the drunks will sober up, the sleepers awaken — while, outside, the world will shake off the night and the fog will slink away from the fields, and the wintry sun, red and slow, will begin its journey. The leftovers of four days and a hundred families waft through the arena.

Outside the drivers are asleep. A part of the rain of money that’s pouring down within will drip onto them as well. They’ve been waiting for it. One lot lives off the other. That’s the way it goes.

Frankfurter Zeitung, January 20, 1925

27. The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace* (1925)

In the newspapers, but also on a hundred bright and arresting posters, I saw advertisements for America’s funniest comedy, guaranteeing me a rip-roaring evening’s entertainment. There was a gold-braided porter standing in front of the three lofty gates, and funny announcements of the film and a very famous clown’s face in red and yellow. A great swarm of happy people pressed up to the box office and bought tickets for themselves. Nothing betrayed the deep seriousness that awaited me inside the theater, and I had no idea what shocks my poor impious soul would encounter there. .

I had long ago set aside the habit of seeing in every Berlin mosque a Muhammadan house of worship. I knew that the mosques here are movie theaters, and the Orient is a movie. Many years ago, once, in the days when I was still a believer, I wanted to attend an early mass. I stepped into the church — and found myself in a railway station. Later on I learned that architectural style counts for nothing, and that it is in red-brick warehouses equipped with lightning conductors that the altar is set up, and God’s word is heard. .

But this time was different:

I was sitting in the third row in front of the greenvelvet curtain. Suddenly the hall darkened, the curtain slowly parted, and a mysterious light that could not have been created by God, and that nature couldn’t manage in a thousand years, ran in soft rivulets over the silvery walls of the hall and down the front of the stage. It was as though a waterfall had been slowly tamed — housetrained — in the course of many years and then applied to the walls of this palace, to run down them slowly and civilly, made to answer to human needs, elemental forces with pretty manners, forces of nature that had had a good talking-to. This illumination was compounded of dawn light and evening red, of empyrean clarity and infernal haze, of big-city air and sylvan green, of moonshine and midnight sun. Things that nature can only accomplish separately or in succession, were here encompassed in the one hall and in the space of one minute. And thus it was made clear to me that an unknown and powerful godhead was here at play, if not in earnest. There was not room to fall to my knees, because we were sitting packed together, but, if it’s possible to say so: It was as though my knees fell to their knees. .

All around me, so far as one can tell faith from people’s faces, were members of various creeds. All were moved. And when a young black man started to pray at an organ, and the mighty sounds of the divine instrument filled the opened hearts of those present, it grew so quiet in the hall that in all the building one could hear nothing but the breathing of the people, almost as at a medical examination, on the order: Breathe deeply!. .

Then a little silver bell tinkled, and out of habit I lowered my head, and, like a small boy, peeked between my fingers. I saw the curtain break in two, and from the opening black men dripped one by one down the steps off the stage, men bearing musical instruments. Last of all, in a great rush, like a teacher entering a classroom, a slender bespectacled young man jumped into the orchestra pit, his long hair flying in front of him in the wind he himself had caused.

He was the conductor. .

And it was wonderful to behold him as he gesticulated wildly with his arms, how he fenced with the whole orchestra with his swift baton, nettled the violins, and elicited stern growls of protest from the double bass, shook the sails of the timpani, and drew silvery snakes from the flutes — and, lo, the name of it was Offenbach.

As the music weighed light or heavy, the projection changed its colors from blue to red to yellow, the musicians were ghosts, and the conductor’s hair sometimes burned with a sacred fire up to the ceiling. The domestic waterfalls still flowed. And finally our reverence discharged itself in violent applause, and those who applauded the loudest were the agnostics. We all confessed the will of a supernatural power, a metaphysical theater management, a heavenly industry. .

And then the projectionist began to officiate at the film by Harold Lloyd.* But who was there who could laugh? No mirth shook my diaphragm. My thoughts were on death, the grave, and the hereafter. And even as the man on the screen was performing some wonderful comic gag, I decided I would dedicate the rest of my life to God, and become a hermit.

At the end of the show I quickly rushed away into a deep dark forest, which I have not left since. .

Frankfurter Zeitung, November 19, 1925

28. The Berlin Pleasure Industry (1930)

Sometimes, in a fit of incurable melancholy, I go into one of the standard Berlin nightclubs, not to cheer myself up, you understand, but to take malicious pleasure at the phenomenon of so much industrialized merriment. Any anxiety that it might be my advancing years that make me incapable of enjoying myself is quickly allayed by my perfectly objective view of the indescribable monotony of international nightlife. The entire mechanism by which fun is produced and communicated these days seems ever more simplistic and transparent the more human nature is forced to import entertainment from outside. It’s as though that crude force that seems capable almost of making something out of nothing had now been tried out on people’s spirits and feelings, in the attempt to create capital from our inborn inclination and need for amusement. And it’s as though this crude and homogenized purveying of fun had also succeeded in producing in all the cities of the world one standardized type of night owl, with the same set of strictly normed and basic requirements, which can be satisfied in accordance with one or two simple rules. At around two o’clock at night, anyway, the image given by a bar, a “luxury spot,” “a dance hall,” is one and the same in Berlin, Paris, Marseilles, and Cairo: the perfumed smoke of international “luxury brand” cigarettes hangs under the ceiling like a sort of gaseous lining or underpinning. The soft reddish illumination works not to create light but to suppress it. The glowing colors of the cocktails, mixed in accordance with international recipes, evoke semiprecious stones in liquid form and are poured into curved glass bowls about the size of a coconut half. Stiff yellow bundles of straws stick out of metal holders, the only remote memory of a long-gone rustic period of human history.

In the corner the band is installed, not to sit but to perform incessant and foolish movements that remind one of the exercise “marching in place.” Merely switched to the world of bacchic militarism from that of war, the saxophone — profane trump of a profane, so to speak, penultimate judgment — flashes and gleams, moans and wails, yelps and croons. The musicians do not wear jackets. They sit in their shirtsleeves like bowlers, in sports shirts like tennis players, in that relaxed Anglo-Saxon uniform that seems to suggest that the production of sound and noise is more a sporting vocation than an artistic one. Bar girls all over the world are made out of the same substance of beauty, with little concession to the local variations of climate, geology, and race, poured equally over every country by a prodigally lavish godhead, to produce that international, slender, narrow-hipped type of child-woman in whom vice is paired with training, knee-jerk modernity with traditional seduction-by-helplessness, active and passive suffrage with the willingness to be bought. In every city there is the prototypical young, or rather, ageless, player in male dress (this the only overt indication of its sex): smooth features and slicked-back hair, padded shoulders and compressed hips, baggy, billowing pants and pointed patent leather boots — and the casual demeanor out of fashion magazines, the nonchalance of a window dummy, the fake worldweariness in the glassy stare, and the thin lips touched up by nature itself in homage, of course, to certain photographic originals. Couples get up simultaneously and indifferently to do their athletic dance routines. The movements of the musicians are livelier than those of the dancers. It’s as though the marionette-like movements of the musicians had taken all the life out of the dancers. The couples who, under the heading “classic modern dance,” go from city to city earning their daily/nightly bread with the same mechanical smile that consists only of the baring of brilliantly maintained teeth — they at least produce an imitation of life. There is no owner to be seen anywhere, as if these bars didn’t actually belong to anyone, as if they were institutions of public luxury, just as buses and streetlights are institutions of utility, as though the entertainment industry wanted to prove its close relationship to the utility industry.

In a city like Berlin there are stock companies that are capable of satisfying the entertainment needs of several social classes at once, catering to the “cosmopolite” in the West End, providing “solid bourgeois” pleasures in other parts of the city, and in a third supplying that part of the lower middle class that wants to have some inkling of the “grand monde” with its very own “third-class establishments.” And just as in a department store there are clothes and food for every social class and even for the myriad delicate nuances in between, carefully graded by price and “quality,” so the great names of the pleasure industry supply every class with the appropriate entertainment and the appropriate — and affordable — drink, from champagne and cocktails to cognac to kirsch to sweet liqueurs down to Patzenhofer beer. In the course of a single night, in which my mournfulness was such that it compelled me to experience the pain of every class of big-city dweller athirst for joy, I slowly made the rounds from the bars of the West End of Berlin to those of the Friedrichstrasse, and from there to the bars in the north of the city, finishing up in the drinking places that are frequented by the so-called lumpenproletariat. As I went, I noticed the schnapps getting stronger, the beers lighter and brighter, the wines more acidic, the music cheaper, and the women older and stouter. Yes, I had the sensation that somewhere there was some merciless force or organization — a commercial undertaking, of course — that implacably forced the whole population to nocturnal pleasures, as it were belaboring it with joys, while husbanding the raw material with extreme care, down to the very last scrap. Saxophonists who have lost their wind playing in the classy bars of the West End carry on playing to the middle class till they lose their hearing, and then they wind up in proletarian dives. In accordance with a strict plan, dancers start out reed thin, to slip slowly, in the fullness of time and their bodies, down from the zones of prodigality to those where people keep count, to the third where people save their pennies, to the very lowest finally, where the expenditure of money is either an accident or a calamity.

One of these places — it was already far along in years, a hoary ancient among the clubs of Berlin — was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and was giving out detailed anniversary programs, complete with unobtainable photographs of long-gone vaudeville stars and popular favorites and a “historical look back.” From this it appeared that the establishment, having once been founded and run by a single man, has fallen into the numerous hands of a consortium, a consortium, I like to imagine, of deadly serious fellows, heavyweight fat cats. There is the photograph of the founding father: the broad round face of a man who knew to live and let live, with the twinkling eyes of a connoisseur, with a mighty upturned moustache betraying a kind of martial good humor, and a slow smile that legitimates the man’s unquestioned desire for profit.

There follow pictures of the “famous numbers,” the “diseuses,” a race of courageous women setting foot on the stage as on a battlefield, armored in corsets, in long skirts, under which peep out — flirtatiously, seductively, sinfully — snow white or salmon pink stockings and tightly laced dancing shoes, Boadiceas with bare throats and powerful shoulders and with abundant piled-up hair on their heads, such that a little nodding double-entendre can’t have been an easy matter; and finally the dancers with round, shapely legs, sewn, one would think, into the whirling expanse of ruffled and lacy underskirts, loose girls of sweet harmlessness and easy virtue. Yes, that’s the way it was then. The clubowner walked around among the tables, and nodded and smiled and allowed his patrons to live and encouraged them to sin as hard as they could. The jokes were terrible, but the people were cheerful, the women were very dressed, but at least they were flesh and blood, and not the product of hygienic training. Pleasure was always a business, but at least it wasn’t yet an industry.

Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, May 1, 1930